In book Film Style & Technology (2009), Barry Salt, a director of photography and theoretical physicist, investigates the relation of film style to film technology, and applies new methods for the formal analysis of films with a practical approach to film theory.
He states that in 1914, exterior scenes purporting to be taking place at night were still exclusively shot under full daylight, and the impression of night was conveyed by the standard blue tinting, usually with the help of a previous descriptive title. In 1915, the first night scenes in fictional films actually shot at night, with the help of artificial light, appeared in few American movies. Notable early examples include a street scene in Cecil B. DeMille's Kindling, which was lit by Alvin Wyckoff solely with a few strategically placed arc floodlights, and a night battle scene done the same way in a short Thanhouser Company production, Their One Love. G.W. Bitzer's cruder solution to the same problem in Birth of a Nation was to use pyrotechnic flares to light the scene of the farewell ball before the battle. By 1916, the use of arc floodlights on moderate scale night exteriors was becoming more and more common. Even though this is fiction, I was curious to see when technology allowed to work night for night.
Moreover, two concepts, that I have previously introduced, das Unheimliche (the uncanny), and the notion of abjection, are clearly present in a sequence of En Chien Andalou, which I include in my virtual exhibition. When it comes to darkness and all the symbolism around being able to inhabit the seen or unseen and "cutting" the eyes open, Luis Buñuel created a masterpiece.
While Maskelyne delivered the first moving picture of an astronomical phenomenon, another magician worked with the representation of the night in his theatre with his famous tricks. 1907, Georges Méliès shot L'Eclipse du Soleil en Pleine Lune. It is a fiction film staged in a theatre. To realize it, Méliès resorted to numerous scenic artifices, rotating painted backdrops, pyrotechnics and everything he had in his spectacular armoury.
Even if this is fiction, I could not resist to dedicate a short chapter to Méliès, as a free association to Maskelyn and a tribute to astronomers and star-gazers, who want, need and dare to be face to face with the Universe: people who are curiosity driven, instead of fear driven, and open to discover and experiment.
His short film, written with Salvador Dalì and released in June 1929, was shot in Le Havre and Paris at the Billancourt Studios.
In his 1939 autobiography Buñuel said: In the film the aesthetics of Surrealism are combined to some of Freud's discoveries. The film was totally in keeping with the basic principle of the school, which defined Surrealism as 'Psychic Automatism', unconscious, capable of returning to the mind its true functions, beyond any form of control by reason, morality or aesthetics.
In the specific sequence I chose to add in this virtual museum shelf, a man (interpreted by Buñuel himself) is sharpening a razor blade. He goes on the balcony and looks up into the night sky. He sees clouds cutting the moon in two. In the next image he opens the eyes of a woman with his fingers and cuts one of her eyes in two with the razor blade.
I cannot find out how the scene was shot and with which camera, but I believe that it must have been shot in the Billancourt Studios. I guess the moon was created with a lamp and the clouds drawn upon it from some flies or racks above the stage.
